26th and Cal: Snapshots from the Criminal Courts Building
May 14, 2008
The Chicago Bar Association recently honored the magazine and the writer, Maria Kantzavelos, with its Herman Kogan Media Award for excellence in legal affairs journalism for this story, which originally appeared in the November 2007 issue of Chicago Lawyer.
Lives hang in balance at the Cook County Criminal Courts Building.
The seven-story, 1929 courthouse with an adjacent office tower built in the late 1970s stands at 26th Street and California Avenue on the Southwest Side as the only courthouse in Cook County that exclusively hears felony cases. And, as one of the biggest and busiest criminal courthouses in the nation, the building sees the vast majority of felony cases in the city.
”At 26th Street, every defendant faces the possibility of imprisonment in the state penitentiary. The stakes for them, their families, the victims and their families, are very high,” said Paul P. Biebel Jr., the presiding judge of the Cook County Circuit Court’s Criminal Division.
Biebel, the chief judicial administrator who also hears a variety of matters in the building, said most of its judges have spent their entire careers in criminal law — many of them practiced previously as prosecutors or defense attorneys in the same building.
Of the 40 trial courtrooms in Cook County that hear solely felony cases from Chicago, 32 are situated in the old courthouse on 26th Street — four are in Bridgeview; four in Old Orchard.
The 40 judges of the Criminal Division disposed of 30,284 felony cases in 2004, Biebel said, citing statistics from a study by American University. Of those cases, 86 percent were disposed of by guilty pleas. Also in that year, there were 364 jury trials and 2,417 bench trials.
Generally, Biebel said, the courthouse sees the cases of 800 to 1,000 defendants at various stages in the criminal process each day. Narcotics cases make up about half the cases in the system, he said, adding that 70 percent of all cases involve drugs directly or indirectly.
”It’s a busy place, exhibiting a lot of vitality and intensity,” Biebel said. ”It’s a vital, energetic place, where the day passes quickly.”
Chicago Lawyer spent two weeks at the Criminal Courts Building in late September and early October — observing and talking to the people who walk the halls and occupy the courtrooms. Here’s a glimpse inside 26th & Cal.
The hub
As customers of Anastacio Rivas get their morning coffee from the vending truck that has become a fixture on the boulevard across from the columned, limestone courthouse and its looming administration building on 26th Street, the building’s lobby takes on a noticeable buzz of its own.
The accused and the victimized, defense lawyers and prosecutors, county residents summoned for jury duty, police officers, clerks, and court reporters are among the masses who walk through the revolving doors into a hub that pulsates with activity on weekdays in the hours surrounding the 9:30 a.m. court calls.
From the nearby elevator doors of the lobby’s connected administration building — which houses the offices of hundreds of assistant state’s attorneys and assistant public defenders, as well as the offices of the hundreds of clerks, interpreters, social workers, psychologists, court reporters, and other personnel who feed the business of the Criminal Courts Building — prosecutors walk by, rolling gray plastic carts filled with evidence and file folders.
They come from offices that take up the top four floors of the administration building. Assistant State’s Attorney John Maher passed through the morning crowd on a Tuesday on his way to present his opening statement in the trial of a man accused of attempting to murder a police officer, which resulted in a guilty verdict by week’s end.
”You’re just trying to walk the case through in your head. I don’t get nervous anymore. It’s not without a certain amount of stress, but it’s manageable,” Maher said, passing through with a cart of evidence in tow. ”It’s like a sports event. The moment the game starts, you kind of lose your butterflies.”
The lobby is one place where Judge Biebel makes it a point to be visible, greeting courthouse employees as he passes through. And in his nearby chambers, the door is often open to visitors, including fellow judges who casually gather there with him over coffee before the start of a day.
Meanwhile, men in baggy jeans and T-shirts fumble to re-buckle their belts after making their way through metal detectors at the building’s entrance, where navy-blue uniformed sheriff’s deputies screen for banned items, like the steak knives, box cutters, and pepper sprays they’ve confiscated over the years. Once or twice a week, an official with the sheriff’s office said, someone is arrested for entering the building with drugs.
Paul P. Biebel Jr., the presiding judge of the Cook County Circuit Court’s Criminal Division.
”Take everything out of all your pockets,” a deputy shouts out. ”Bus cards, credit cards, watches, wallets, keys, belts. Everything on the table. Bags on the conveyer.”
There are characters who reappear each morning in the lobby of the courthouse and office building, like Ernestine Terrell and Samuel Abu Mohammed, who leisurely sit side-by-side behind a rickety information desk as the lobby traffic passes them by.
”There are a lot of hurting people who come up to this desk,” Terrell said. ”Someone was here yesterday crying because their dad was murdered and they wanted to know what courtroom to go to.”
Then there’s Jerry Neal, who cheerfully raises a fist and chants, ”Go Cubs, go,” as he carts trays of fruit and bread rolls to the jurors selected for the day’s trials.
And there are children who pass through the lobby, making their way into the spectator gallery of the nearby courtroom that hears fast-paced bond hearings, or the galleries of one of the felony trial courtrooms above.
”Sometimes you get a kid, 4 or 5. And they bring their dad out from lockup,” said Joeseph Cataldo, a first-chair assistant state’s attorney in the felony trial division. ”They start yelling, ‘Daddy, daddy.’ Those are kind of rough.”
The Bridge
By 8:30 on one morning, after taking the block-and-a-half trek through a grimy tunnel lined with large steam pipes, hundreds of men dressed in tan jail scrubs had been sorted by court call and had made their way into steel-mesh bullpens.
A female sheriff’s deputy calls out their names above the cacophonous sound of voices that bounce off the low ceilings and walls of the narrow walkways in the dank underground.
Nearby, about a dozen men stood with legs spread and the palms of their hands against the brick wall of another dim, fluorescent-lit walkway, where sheriff’s deputies wearing rubber gloves searched each man for contraband.
Another sheriff’s deputy waited near an elevator that leads up to the lockups behind the felony trial courtrooms where some of the men’s cases would be heard that day.
Two-by-two, the men approach — appearing as if they know the drill. In their left hand, some carry cellophane-wrapped, pink Styrofoam trays of stacked luncheon meat and sliced bread, and a small plastic jug of an orange-colored drink.
With a free hand fisted, two men with tired eyes each extend an arm to the sheriff’s deputy near the elevator, who handcuffs them to one another — right wrist to right wrist.
Just as the public entrance to the courthouse buzzes with activity, so too does this area beneath it known by those who work there as ”The Bridge.”
This is the place where men and women walk the gritty, concrete floors of a subterranean system of holding cells and tunnels that connect the courthouse to the adjacent Cook County Jail complex.
”We’re just like a way station,” said Sgt. Craig Matek, who supervises the transport of jail detainees and new arrestees to and from the courthouse. ”But it’s every day, 365 days a year. It never stops.”
About 500 detainees of the massive jail complex that covers several street blocks are transported daily to and from the courthouse via the windowless bridge, said Donald Dulaney, assistant chief deputy sheriff.
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